When You Have to Step Away for a Week

At some point you will not be able to work for a week. Flu, a family thing, a holiday you actually want to take. It is worth deciding in advance what happens to the shop while you are gone, because the decisions you make in the hour before you leave are usually the wrong ones.

Say you are away before you are away

A buyer who knows you are back on the ninth will wait. A buyer who sends a message on the third and hears nothing assumes you have stopped trading and goes elsewhere. The difference between those two outcomes is one sentence written before you leave, and it costs nothing.

Do not take everything down

Pulling your listings feels tidy and it is expensive. On most sites a listing that disappears loses whatever standing it had built, and you come back to start again rather than to carry on. Leave them up, say when you are shipping again, and let people order for the week you return.

Decide what you will still do

Answering a message from a phone is not the same as running the business, and it is worth being honest with yourself about which one you are actually willing to do. Half working a holiday tends to produce a slow reply and a resentful seller. Either you are answering or you are not, and either is fine as long as the notice says which.

Postage is the part that goes wrong

Anything you have already sold still needs to reach someone. If it is packed and labelled before you go, someone else can put it in a postbox. If it is a pile of unlabelled parcels and a mental note, it waits for you, and the buyer counts the days without knowing why.

Coming back is easier than it looks

The instinct on the first morning back is to catch up on everything at once. Answer the people who are waiting, post the parcels, and leave the rest. A week away does not undo a shop. Silence with no explanation is the only part of it that actually costs you anything.